The Board of Education has been looking at changing the criteria for the Diversity Index that is used in student assignment at the District’s schools that have waiting lists.

Currently, there are two cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court where two public school districts, St. Louis and Seattle are trying to incorporate race as part of the selection criteria for school assignment. SFUSD had used race as part of its student assignment process for schools with waiting lists from 1983 to 1999. During that time period, SFUSD also had a cap that the maximum percentage of students for any racial/ethnic group-45% for non-alternative schools (i.e. neighborhood schools with attendance areas) and 40% for alternative schools.

Three years ago, San Francisco voters voted to give a portion of the City’s revenues to SFUSD for enrichment programs. SFUSD has a series of community meetings to discuss the progress of the programs funded by Proposition H.

Wednesday, Nov. 29
Presidio Middle School
450 30th Avenue
6-7:30 p.m.

Thursday, Nov. 30
Balboa High School
1000 Cayuga
6-7:30 p.m.

Wednesday, Dec. 6
International Studies Academy
655 DeHaro
6-7:30 p.m.

Thursday, Dec. 7
A.P. Giannini Middle School
3151 Ortega
6-7:30

The Board of Education meet as a committee of the whole to discuss the District’s student assignment process. The discussion was for informational purposes. Commissioners Wynns and Yee were not present.

Members of the District’s Public Engagement Committee on Student Assignment discussed their 50 meetings with 500 people, beginning on Oct. 1. The San Francisco Education Fund, the District’s Parent Advisory Committee and the District’s Public Engagement Process have been holding structured community meetings to find out the community’s aspirations for schools and their feelings about the District’s s school selection process.

We haven’t really talked much about the school board’s decision to pitch the JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps) from the San Francisco schools. I get that there are some reasonable arguments for it, but I believe that our schools shouldn’t support a program that prepares students for a job they will not be allowed to do if they’re gay. I also think that if we’re going to train our students to fight wars, we should also find ways to train them to fight fot the planet, or for equality and justice. Imagine a Junior Conservation Officer Training Corps, or a Junior Civil Rights Advocate Training Corps. Almost certainly better for society, but laughable in the face of the military-industrial complex.

Political Wire quotes Dan Walters as claiming that Schwarzenegger’s thinking about running against Boxer in 2010, or perhaps for Feinstein’s seat in 2012.

“Boxer is several notches to the left of California’s political center and has never enjoyed particularly high voter approval ratings, even though she’s won three six-year terms. The Democrats’ newly minted Senate majority will mean that confrontation, a Boxer trait, will dominate Washington with Iraq the chief bone of contention. Her visibility will increase, which means she could either gain or lose ground during the next four years.”

That’s what a friend told me after meeting him on a recent visit to San Francisco, and if you are a reader of BeyondChron, they are too. Randy Shaw has run a couple of articles suggesting that Obama run for President. Well sign me up. Oh but you can sign up. I drank the Kool-Aid, will you?

Check it out. Of course, as someone one would get my ass kicked if I lived somewhere else, I would say yes, they are worth saving. But for those of you who feel safe in the world, maybe not? Anyway, have fun. There are some great panelists, so I’m sure it will be very interesting.

Kickoff Roundtable in New Series

“Queer in the City: GLBT Neighborhoods and Urban Planning”

Co-Sponsored by GLBT Historical Society and Castro Coalition

The Chronicle’s John King agrees with what I wrote earlier, that we should give up on a stadium and make the area where the stadium is now a real neighborhood, rather than a huge, windswept waste of empty parking lots.

So here’s my advice to the Newsom administration. Don’t waste time trying to revive a plan for Candlestick Point that the San Francisco 49ers already have rejected. Instead, count the would-be anchor tenant’s departure as a blessing — and get serious about using 80 acres in the south corner of San Francisco to create a new neighborhood that will help revive nearby Bayview-Hunters Point.

The pentagon has decided the hot way to recruit kids into the military is to make games where the kids can play with all the whizbang planes and tanks and robots and whatnot the US military is developing.

It turns out that the games are made intentionally easy, to give the kids the idea war’s all about twiddling a joystick while a robot goes and kills the bad guys.

The new PC title, Future Force Company Commander, or F2C2, is a nifty God-game that puts players in the driver’s seat of 18 systems at the heart of the military’s new net-centric warfare approach. The Army added the game to its recruiting tool kit last month as a high-tech follow-up to its successful America’s Army shooter.

OK, so it turns out that President Bush’s “source for all information bicycling” is a place called Revolution Cycles?

Not only that, he just got a new bike, and it has a suspension fork on it called a Lefty?

If only it had some effect…

Oh, and in the Bike Biz article, it claims that Nancy Pelosi is a cyclist. Anyone heard of this or seen her on a bike?

image of Lefty courtesy Gary Nuke